Happy New Year SWLing Post community!
A few months ago, I published a post about Colin Anderton’s excellent Radio Moscow recordings from the late 1970s. Being a space flight enthusiast, all of Colin’s brief off-air recordings feature news from the 1977-1978 Soyuz 26 mission to the Salyut 6 space station.
Recently, I started posting Colin’s recordings on a schedule so that each recording is being published exactly 40 years from the original broadcast date. Check out the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive each day (or subscribe via iTunes) to listen to the recordings.
Below, I’ve embedded the recording from New Year’s Day 1978 where we learned that Yuri Romanenko and Georgi Grechko toasted the New Year with fruit juice (for obvious reasons, champagne was not allowed on the station!).
This isn’t related, but it reminds me that a school in England was well known at one time for tracking satellites. It was at Kettering school. Early satellites of course were simple, and often transmitting at shortwave frequencies, so one could try to hear them without special equipment. Popular Electronics even ran a regular column in the early sixties that listed new satellites, and their frequencies.
So if one heard a new satellite, it was quite the score. At Kettering, one teacher brought it up as a means of teaching science, and they got pretty good at it. I remember reading about them in the paper in the late sixties or early seventies.
It was big stuff back then, though in retrospect amateur radio satellites followed pretty fast, and some were receiving weather photos by about 1967.
Michael